It's dark and my lights aren't working (an asyncio success story)

Scenario: You have a houseful of “smart” light bulbs, based on ZigBee. The vendor software and hardware is pretty much completely broken. You have one seemingly simple goal in mind: if you turn the lights on in the middle of the night, they should be dim. It’d be nice to have a single button by the front door that turns off the entire house. Oh, and find a way to make up for the terrible placement of light switches in this house. And most of all, not require unlocking my phone and using some app to control the lights!! Seriously who wants to use their phone to turn on their lights?

Join me on my adventure, starting with lights that don’t work, a soldering iron, a Wikipedia page about ZigBee, and an unhealthy misunderstanding of the sunk cost fallacy. And Python!

Over time, I acquired software defined radios, ZigBee transceivers, extremely worrying firmware updates, a mitre saw, hundreds of RGB leds, a baby, more 8051 assembly than anticipated, some familiarity with asyncio, more ZigBee devices, and finally… success.

This was my first time using asyncio, and it really worked well for this project. I hope you can walk away from this talk with an appreciation of how asyncio is life-changing and how home automation can actually be a great thing. And you might even see a light bulb running async Python code.